Reset reading: "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson

If you download an audiobook from iBooks now, it seems, you also get the text version at the same time. (Unless the system glitched on me twice the same day.) Which is interesting, because you can mix your media. I "read" most of Life After Life as an audiobook in the long - but not quite long enough - car trip from Brussels to Rome, but was able to fill in bits by reading a chapter or two on my phone. In case you were wondering, the dual versions were not in sync, so I had to re-find my place when I switched, but I can't imagine that is a feature which will be long coming.

Life After Life is a hefty book, 630 pages in its paperback manifestation, or 15½ hours' listening. It has taken me a while to get round to acting on this at least year-old recommendation by unfailing literary guru, Paola Buonadonna, but it was well worth it. I may as well say it now, Kate Atkinson has bowled me over once again with this extraordinary book.

"What if we had the chance to do it again and again … until we finally get it right?" So observes Teddy, one of the novel's minor, though highly significant characters, expressing the premise on which Life After Life is based. This is a story of alternative outcomes, lived primarily, though by no means exclusively - the history of the world may also change, by Ursula, the third-born of a well-to-do middle class family residing in the still bucolic delights of the Home Counties, just beyond the fringes on London. From the outset, alternative paths are signalled. Her birth, on 11 February 1910, occurs earlier than expected, on a day of severe snow, which prevents both doctor and midwife from attending the mother, Sylvie. Tragically, the baby is born with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, and Ursula never even manages to draw breath. Except, in the next scene, the doctor has somehow beaten the snow and is on hand with the vital surgical scissors and Ursula lives. Such alternative scenarios recur over and over again: Ursula's young life is blotted out, always marked with a variant on the phrase "... and darkness fell" on several occasions, only for us to be taken back to 11 February 1910 for the start of another variant on the life, one in which Ursula, never consciously but often guided by a vague hunch, a sense of dread, or what her mother calls déjà vu, avoids her (intended?) fate. 

If it sounds tricksy, then perhaps it is, but we the reader are in on the trick, and in the hands of Atkinson the characters and their several stories are no less real or important for us. As the novel progresses, and as Ursula grows into a complicated adult, the alternative outcomes are more nuanced, more significant, more tied up with the wider world. In one version of her life, one where her path is set by a casual rape which shatters the Home Counties idyll, her destiny is bitter and painful to read. Few readers will forget the name of the odious Derek Oliphant in a hurry. In another, where her just slightly more worldly wise sixteen year-old self fends off her not-to-be young rapist with relative ease (a world-shattering experience transformed into a tiny, slightly amusing, footnote), her life takes on a totally different trajectory. Several indeed, most finding their deepest significance in the blitzed London of 1940-41, but another at least finding her in Berlin, similarly bombed, in 1945, the result of, of all things, an extended acquaintanceship with Eva Braun.

Kate Atkinson

So is this all some kind of literary game? It could be, would be maybe in the hands of a lesser novelist. But here, somehow, Atkinson's telling of many stories adds up to the telling of one big multi-facetted story. It is at once a family saga and a evocation of a wider story, that of an England transformed by two great cataclysms, which sweep away traditional ways, families, class structures, certainties. This is a world in which all the alternative possibilities we are shown are, well, possible, just as Ursula is a person who encompasses, as we all do, myriad possibilities. For the possibilities to coexist is perhaps impossible, but the picture their coexistence paints is real, nuanced, insightful.

Atkinson's sense of place, her ear for accents and rhythms of speech, her sensitivity to subtle shifts in relationships and society, her ability to create rounded and complete characters, unchanging even across very different destinies, all go together to create a deep and perceptive portrait of a world in extraordinary flux, generally through domestic tableaux, though, at the heart of the novel, also in the desperate and extreme circumstances of the London Blitz. At the same time, this is a character-driven story of people. Somehow, irrespective of the myriad different outcomes for individuals, Atkinson manages to create quite a linear story of a family, one whose members become familiar to us and in whose destinies we invest, for all that we know they are highly contingent.

So, no question, this is a recommendation.